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Maren had kept the Gull Rock light for eleven winters, and in all that time the sea had never sent her anything but weather.

So when the bottle rolled against her boot one grey morning, she almost kicked it back. The glass was green and scratched, the cork sealed with red wax. Inside, a folded page. On the outside, in careful ink: For the keeper of the light.

She opened it at the kitchen table with her tea going cold.

"You don't know me," the letter began. "But every night for three years I have watched your light from the other side of the strait. I was a fisherman once. Now I am old and my eyes are failing, and your light is the last thing I can still see clearly. I wanted to thank you before I can't."

It was signed only with an initial: T.

Maren read it four times. Then she climbed to the lamp room and looked across the water, where the far shore was a thin dark line. A few lamps glowed in the village there. Any one of them could be his.

That night, at the turn of the hour, she did something she had never done in eleven years. She covered the lamp for three seconds, uncovered it, covered it again. Short, short, long. Hello, in the old signal the fishermen used.

She waited. The wind pressed against the glass.

Then, across the strait, a small window light went dark. And came back. Short, short, long.

Maren laughed out loud, alone in the tower.

They talked like that all winter, a few words a night, clumsy and slow. She learned he had a cat named Admiral. He learned she hated fog more than storms. In spring the mail boat brought a real letter, then another. In summer, a man with a cane and a very large cat stepped off the ferry at Gull Rock and squinted up at her tower.

"It's smaller than I pictured," he said.

"You're older than I pictured," said Maren.

They both agreed that was fair, and she made tea, and this time neither of them let it go cold.